A Return to the Scarlet Letter -- Ch. 1

I love this book. Not only is it a study of the strictly ordered communities in our national history, but it is also an examination of signs and signifiers, those pesky things through which we try to make sense of the universal chaos we seem unable to tolerate. What I'm noticing this read is how much Hawthorne seems to be commenting on the arbitrary nature of signs, and how close to the edge of reason he takes the reader, without letting them fall into the void.

I used to think that the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter was to orient the reader using a man v. nature construction. I saw the prison and the cemetery as emblematic of societies' struggle to control the natural instincts of humans, which stretch even to how they order their burial -- death and decay being the last triumph of the forces of the universe. Yet, the last paragraph of the chapter "The Prison Door" causes me to wonder just how much Hawthorne is playing with our sentiments concerning signifiers. It reads

The rose bush, by strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Anne Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about the issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

First, I am struck by Hawthorne's narrator's tone. I am almost convinced that this entire paragraph is meant to be satirical. The narrator comments that the appearance of the rosebush "has been kept alive in history." What is this "history"? Is it the historical texts of the 1600s that Hawthorne was so fond of pouring over? Is it the oral tradition, the folkloric tradition, the mythological rendition? Or does the narrator suggest that it still exists, is still alive? And what of this "old wilderness"? Is the narrator referring to the original clearing of the forest where the colony now sits? The next aside, about Anne Hutchinson, contributes heavily to the passages satirical tone. To suggest that the rosebush magically sprouted from under the feet of Anne Hutchinson is to either put a stake in, or sarcastically undermine, the feminist movement of the 1800s. Which is it? I think for Hawthorne, it has to be both.

The novel is ultimately feminist, and critical of the ways in which feminist arguments digress due to sentiment and nostalgia. If you want to argue that Anne Hutchinson is a feminist icon, a legend concerning a rose bush springing up under her feet as she marched to prison to await trial for her feminist heresy would only serve to genderize a rosebush. It's the act of using gender as a signifier that Hawthorne is ridiculing. I don't think the narrator is as neutral as he claims to be. The narrator says that "we shall not take upon us to determine," but giving the comparison between the story about a strong thriving rosebush surviving the "rape" of the wilderness by the colonists, and a fable concerning its association with Anne Hutchinson, allows the reader to focus on the significance of a rosebush in the first place. I usually like to go on about the rose as the old chivalric symbol of feminine purity, and gnostic symbolism, which uses the rose to symbolize the divine feminine. I don't think this information is lost on Hawthorne. I do think that when the narrator "plucks" a rose for us, it is not, as it says, to "serve to symbolize some sweet moral blossom." I think it is handed to us so that we can examine what we think the rose, and by extension, gender, means.